When I was updating a story today I noticed that the Automotive History Preservation Society has changed its URL. The organization’s website can now be found at autohistorypreservationsociety.org. Indie Auto links when possible to its sources, so I now have a whole bunch of dead links to fix. Your patience is appreciated.
The society’s new website is quite different from the old one. It looks more modern, and would appear to have more bells and whistles. However, I have thus far found it more cumbersome to find basic stuff.
Ode to the tedious toggle
I assume that navigating the website will get easier with practice, but I’m also not a big fan of a toggle-based sorting tools. For example, in order to look up advertising for a specific model, you have to scroll through a toggle that presumably has every nameplate in the known universe. Fortunately, the toggles don’t move as slowly as those at the Classic Car Database. In addition, you can type your query into a “search” box instead. However, either way the process is more tedious than with the old website.
A big reason why is that the society does not (yet) have a comprehensive collection of ads and brochures. On the old website I could quickly scan one page to see which model years had content posted for a brand. Now I apparently have to look up each year individually. That can get time consuming. So my inclination is to go first to the Old Car Advertisements/Brochures websites, where I can find things more quickly.
Of course, the society didn’t design its website just for researchers like me. And I assume that the new architecture may be a big improvement when it comes to organizing a vast collection of materials. However, I do think it is important for frequent users of a website to offer feedback.
Saying Goodbye to the wildaboutcars site did not go quite as planned so we launched this new site even though the document transfer is not complete. We have more than doubled the content since this was written. We ask that you please be patient with us as we upload massive amounts of documents over the next few weeks. There are multiple was to search for content and it’s only going to get better.
Thank you for stopping by and giving us an update, Dawn. I know from my own experience that website transfers can be troublesome — and I do like how your new website looks. So I will be patient . . . and eventually get caught up in fixing my broken links to wildaboutcars.